…for your post Valentine’s Day pleasure. Hey…it’s not all half price chocolates…

The other day I re-subscribed to Sirius/XM satellite radio because they made me an offer that was hard to refuse, even given how much I am still PO’d over what they did to my music lineup, and especially their gay channel OutQ…now ex-gay I suppose since it’s no longer there.

They offered me the music at three bucks a month for three years, and instead of that automatically renewing at the higher standard rate it simply expires and I have to get a new subscription or the radio goes silent. That’s fine with me, wonderful even. I’ve been piping Pandora through my car stereo via my iPhone for decades now.

For five bucks extra (that’s two bucks more than the music) I got the traffic maps, which show up on my car’s “Command” display. I’ve missed having those since I let that traffic only subscription lapse.

I can get traffic maps and navigation on the iPhone via Google Maps, and I have an iPhone holder that goes into one of the cup holders in the center console. But the Mercedes central Command display is easier to glance at and adjust while driving because it responds to the steering wheel buttons. I buy the smallest iPhones they make because I want the phone to fit into my pocket and I’m not a big guy. But this makes its display difficult to use while driving.

So I have the satellite radio stuff back at the max price I’m willing to pay for it, and it all works now, and there are still some music channels I like listening to on it. But I keep thinking about what there was when the service first started, and how it seemed to systematically remove what I liked most. And especially what they did to OutQ.

See…OutQ‘s afternoon/evening programming was mostly Derick and Romaine which was a raunchy talk format I just couldn’t listen to. But there was Michelangelo Signorile’s news and talk program which I really liked, and for a while Air America. And then there was Pat Marino’s Sunset Cruise.

Sunset Cruise was a really sweet love song call-in dedication show that ran late on Sundays. I loved Sunset Cruise. I would listen to it while I drew my political cartoons for my website and Baltimore OUTLoud on Sunday nights. All the heartfelt love that came through on that show really kept my spirits up while I was drawing cartoons about the latest spew of anti-gay bigotry in that week’s newspapers.

It was sweet, it was heartfelt, and it raised my spirits to face the coming week. If it wasn’t for those two things, Signorile and Sunset Cruise, I wouldn’t have bothered with OutQ at all.

Then they replaced Sunset Cruise with…repeats of the Derick and Romaine show. Because we all know that homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex…

Anyway…it’s the day after. How about a repost from the 2013 Valentine’s Day Poster Contest?